Matt Gurney: If anyone's insulted the voters, it's Mayor Rob Ford

If anyone's insulted the voters, it's Mayor Rob Ford

My colleague Marni Soupcoff recently wrote that Mayor Rob Ford was removed from Toronto’s top job via a “terribly undemocratic” law. She also discussed the anger felt by some Toronto voters, who feel that the ruling was an insult to democratically expressed selection of Ford.

Ford was chosen in a free and fair election. There’s no denying that. He beat the second-place candidate, George Smitherman, by better than 90,000 votes. And I share the concerns of Marni — not to mention Post columnist Christie Blatchford, the paper’s entire editorial board and the judge that presided over Ford’s fate — that the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act (MCIA) is a clunky, needlessly draconian law, urgently in need of reform.

But is his removal an insult? I don’t think so. If anyone has insulted Toronto’s voters, it’s Ford himself.

I’m not talking about Ford’s many embarrassing gaffes: Spats with Margaret Atwood and reporters, giving young children the finger or attempting to read an entire briefing memo while driving a moving car, to name three examples among too many. All of those things were stupid, but we can set them aside and focus just on the crux of this issue — Ford was removed for office because he showed utter contempt for how the city of Toronto works.

Yes, the MCIA is a lousy law. It doesn’t permit someone accused of a conflict of interest to speak in their own defence, and provides only extremely narrow exemptions that will permit a judge to impose anything but a removal form office. These are serious issues. But however poor the law may be, it is the law.

If Ford wanted to make a principled stand, he could lent the considerable power of his office to demanding that a well-intended but poorly written law be amended. As it stands, he simply stumbled over it. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, even if the law badly needs reform.

And why was Ford ignorant? The MCIA may be draconian, but it is not an obscure, little known provision left over from the horse-and-buggy era. Nor is it something brand-spankin’ new that Ford could have reasonably caught an elected official off-guard. It was passed 40 years ago and has been regularly amended since. Further, and this is critical, information about the MCIA is part of the basic reading material issued to every elected official in the City of Toronto when they take office. Ford was a city councilor for 10 years, spanning three terms, before he was elected mayor. That means Ford has had the city’s crucial governing rules, including the MCIA and council’s Code of Conduct, handed to him on four separate occasions.

Yet he’s never read them. That’s not supposition on my part, that’s Ford’s own testimony. In September, when his conflict of interest case was before the courts, Ford testified that he had never read the guidelines. He didn’t think he needed to, since, as the son of a one-term provincial MPP, who was elected to office when Ford was in his mid-twenties, he figured he knew everything he needed to know already.

The irony, of course, is that Ford really needed to read the rulebook. As his testimony made clear, Ford did not know what a conflict of interest is. He thought he knew what it meant, but his belief, and the law’s reality, did not align.

Ford talks a good game about respecting taxpayers, and has certainly shown a willingness to go the extra mile to reduce spending and help citizens deal with the city’s bureaucracy. But respecting taxpayers means respecting their government and how it works, not just their pocketbooks.

If there’s been too little of the latter in Toronto municipal politics, Ford’s decision to prioritize it to the utter exclusion of everything else is no better. Think of all the time and energy that will be wasted dealing with the fallout of this situation. That counts just as much as money spent through a councillor’s expense account. Respecting the taxpayer means respecting the job of councillor, and mayor, enough to learn how to do it properly. And we’re not talking about spending eight years getting a Ph.D in governance here. We’re talking about reading a briefing document.

That’s why Toronto voters, even those who rightly share his desire for a smaller, more efficient government, should feel insulted. Ford didn’t respect the job the voters entrusted him with to bother doing it right.